Award-winning VFX studio Frantic Films VFX, a division of Prime
Focus Group, recently served as a lead visual effects provider for
the forthcoming stereoscopic feature film, “Journey to the
Center of the Earth,” produced by Walden Media and New Line
Cinema. Based on the Jules Verne classic of the same name, the
movie is directed by Academy Award-winning visual effects veteran
Eric Brevig. The 3D film is slated for U.S. release on July 11,
2008.

“Journey to the Center of the Earth” tells the story of
Trevor (Brendan Fraser), a science professor who discovers a
dangerous lost world on a quest to find his missing brother. Trevor
leads his nephew Sean (played by Josh Hutcherson) down a volcano in
Iceland to the mythical center of the earth. The group encounters
many adventures along the way, including prehistoric animals and a
slew of natural hazards.

Frantic Films VFX was one of three major VFX vendors tapped to work
on the film, joining Hybride and Meteor Studios. The filmmakers
came to Frantic Films VFX because of the studio’s expertise
in creating believable digital water effects using its proprietary
fluid simulation suite Flood, which has been used on a number of
feature films, including “Mr. Magorium’s Wonder
Emporium,” “Superman Returns,”
“Cursed,” and others.

Building a flexible, non-linear creature pipeline
For this movie, Frantic Films VFX created three digital characters
end-to-end—the Razorfish, Plesiosaur and
Trilobite—developing a flexible character pipeline using
Autodesk 3ds Max. Custom plug-ins were scripted to manage data
interchange from rigging to animation, modeling and lighting. This
non-linear approach provided a more practical workflow; in the
event that changes were called for, the team didn’t have to
halt the entire production pipeline.

Frantic was responsible for 123 shots in a pivotal and frenetic 4
½-minute sequence in which the film’s main characters
stand atop a raft on turbulent 100 percent computer-generated seas,
with upward of 100 fish and up to seven plesiosaurs all jumping out
of the water. The actors were shot against green screen on an
articulated raft set piece, with the CG Razorfish, Plesiosaurs,
water, storms, a sail, and the bioluminescent glow the fish give
off underwater all composited into the live-action plate. And while
the scene was shot with on-set rain pouring down, Frantic Films VFX
rotoscoped out a significant portion of the rain and recreated it
in CG to ensure the rain across the entire scene was seamlessly
consistent.

Said Chris Harvey, Visual Effects Supervisor, Frantic Films VFX,
Vancouver, “Much of the Raft scene involved the actors
interacting directly with the sea creatures, including one shot in
which Trevor wrestles a particularly monstrous one. It was a
challenge making these actor-to-digital character interactions look
real, but doubly challenging because we were working in stereo.
Depth perception tells the viewer if an object is in front of or
behind something, so we had to keep that in mind when creating and
animating the sea characters. That, combined with the fact that we
were tasked with such a large number of elements in this scene all
interacting with the live-action, meant we had one of the most
technically challenging scenes to work with on the film.”

Believable fluids
With the Raft scene featuring an all-digital ocean, ensuring the
liquid simulations were realistic was key. Frantic Films VFX used
its in-house Flood toolset consisting of Flood:Surf, Flood:Spray
and Flood:Core, all of which integrate seamlessly with each other
and with Autodesk 3ds Max. The ocean shots utilized three different
simulation tools depending on the complexity of the shot.
Flood:Surf was used to create the overall ocean surface. In
building the ocean surface, a medium-resolution display in a
viewport using Flood:Surf provided an imperative interactive view
of the water surface. Then, when rendered via the Nvidia Gelato
renderer, included all the finer subpixel displacement necessary to
create a believable liquid surface.

When characters or objects would interact with the ocean surface,
Flood:Core was used to provide the gross displacement of the water
and was then combined with the ocean surface simulations. Then, for
the significant interaction shots that resulted in particles and
spray, Flood:Spray was built to simulate these key splashes and
interactive events.

Prior to writing Flood:Spray, Frantic Films VFX evaluated several
tools and, in the end, made the choice to write its own particle
simulator from scratch. Mark Wiebe, the company’s Head of
Software, designed a custom particle-based fluid solver as well as
surface blending tools, allowing the Flood simulation to blend back
to the ocean surface in a controllable manner.

Developing the stereo 3D workflow
In addition to designing a custom character pipeline, Frantic Films
VFX also built a stereoscopic pipeline. The studio looked at three
different approaches to compositing before devising a process to
composite in stereo, with the left and right eye accounted for at
the same time. Custom plug-in tools were built by Frantic
Films’ VFX R&D team led by Mark Wiebe, including one for
Eyeon Fusion that manages the left and right eyes and separates
them so that while compositing a shot, the artists could preview
any element of the shot in stereo.

Explains Mike Shand, Visual Effects Supervisor, Frantic Films VFX,
Winnipeg, “Stereo work has typically been completed by doing
work on the left eye frame, followed by the right. We felt really
good with our process of doing the compositing and effects
simultaneously on each eye as one doublewide image, because right
away, we had a review image in stereo. Every shot was in stereo at
every level of completeness "

The studio also built two screening rooms—one in the
Vancouver office, and one in Winnipeg—so the VFX artists
could review the sequences in stereo and in large format. These
rooms boast silver screen HD resolution in full stereo projection,
with polarized filters so when the artists don 3D glasses they get
1 to 2K resolution per eye, with DPX playback.

Frantic Films VFX also did custom development to facilitate how the
metadata translated to the actual camera rig to simplify final 3D
renders. The 3D camera systems used to shoot “Journey to the
Center of the Earth” were equipped to change their
interocular distance dynamically, making the process of tracking
and then applying a basic offset to the second camera impossible.
Fortunately, the cameras recorded additional metadata that captured
all of the animated interocular movements. Frantic Films VFX wrote
tools to extract this data and used it to generate the second
camera. The tools also allowed for some additional tweaking to
correct imperfections in the information recovered from the
footage.

The creature and stereoscopic pipeline put in place worked so well,
Frantic Films VFX was also later awarded the opening shot of the
film, which involves a nightmare sequence in which Trevor witnesses
how his brother Max disappears. Max is seen running through a cave,
chased by a giant Tyrannosaurus Rex. As the opening title
disappears, the audience sees a fossilized trilobite, and then an
actual trilobite—created entirely by Frantic Films
VFX—coming toward the audience.

Frantic Films VFX employed a team of 15 to 60 artists, programmers
and simulation technicians on “Journey to the Center of the
Earth” for the duration of the 12-month project. The Frantic
Films VFX team was led by Vancouver Visual Effects Supervisor Chris
Harvey, Winnipeg Visual Effects Supervisor Mike Shand, Visual
Effects Producer Randal Shore and Head of Software Mark Wiebe.

About Frantic Films VFX
Headquartered in Winnipeg, Canada, with offices in Vancouver and
Los Angeles, Calif., Frantic Films VFX has been operating divisions
that provide visual effects for film and television, and VFX
software development since 1997. Frantic Films’ VFX
award-winning visual effects teams have worked on films including
Fantastic Four: The Rise of the Silver Surfer, Grindhouse, Superman
Returns, X-Men 3, Poseidon and many others. The company’s
software tools were developed to solve complex production
challenges on in-house feature effects projects, and are also in
use at many leading 3D animation and effects facilities worldwide.
In November of 2007 Frantic Films VFX became a division of
international post and VFX leader Prime Focus Group. For more
information, visit http://www.franticfilms.com.

All supporting images are
copyright.
Images cannot be copied, printed, or reproduced in any manner
without written permission from Frantic Films VFX.

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